The government on Friday made public a heavily redacted memo that was used to legally justify the killing of an American overseas.
Acting under pressure from a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and the New York Times, the Justice Department turned over the long-sought Feb. 19, 2010 Office of Legal Counsel memo relating to the killing of Anwar al-Aulaqi.
Characterized as “egregiously over-redacted” by ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer, the seven page memo is signed by then-Acting Assistant Attorney General David J. Barron. Barron is now a judge on the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals.
The only words that survive the redacting knife on pages 2 and 3 are “top secret.”
Snippets that survive include the ominous sounding word play “killings in self-defense are not assassination.” More elaborately, the memo declares that “the use of lethal force would not violate the Fourth Amendment” if certain conditions prevail, including a “capture operation ts infeasible and the targeted person is part of a dangerous enemy force and poses a continued and imminent threat to U.S. persons or interests.”